HBO

“That applause lasted longer than the whole FBI investigation.”

That’s how Bill Maher opened Friday night’s edition of Real Time—with a cheeky jab at Senate Republicans’ “sham” FBI investigation into the sexual-assault allegations levied against Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court. It appears as though Kavanaugh is all but confirmed after Senator Collins (R-ME) and Senator Flake (R-AZ) said they would vote for him on Friday.

“It was a total sham,” said Maher. “There are some things about this that we will never know, I account for that. But you know what? I think what bothers a lot of people—and what bothers me—is that for sure [Kavanaugh] is a liar, also was a huge drunk, maybe not now. And the FBI report was a sham. They had no time to do it. They interviewed all of nine people. Trump was like, ‘Can I get these guys to do my crimes?’”

“And the FBI allowed ‘no walk-ins.’ Is this the FBI or a beauty salon? What the fuck?” Maher continued. “The part I love is they issued their report—the FBI did—so secret, so sensitive, is that the way that it had to be read is that senators, one at a time, went into a little secure room, lined up, got in, read the report, and then got out. This is how you run a train on democracy, ladies and gentlemen.”

But later on, during the panel portion of the HBO show, Maher appeared to defend Kavanaugh by blaming Democrats for probing too deeply into his past.

“There are social justice warriors who are crazy enough in this country, I fight with them all the time, who… they lend enough credence to this to make people think, ‘Oh, you know what? They’re going to go after my high school record. That’s fair game now.’ And it becomes sort of a privacy thing,” argued Maher.

Maher’s opinion here, railing against “social justice warriors,” is divorced from reality—and aligns him with the conservative right. The truth of the matter is, there are women who came forward with credible sexual-assault allegations against Kavanaugh, and those allegations needed to be properly vetted before you confirm someone to a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. But as Maher noted earlier in the program, the FBI conducted a for-show investigation, one that didn’t even include interviews with the primary accuser (Dr. Christine Blasey Ford) and the accused (Brett Kavanaugh). And by comparison, Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch, a judge who stands further to the right of Kavanaugh politically, was confirmed to the Supreme Court last April without any probing of his high school record or sexual-assault allegations against him—because he wasn’t accused of an attempted rape during his high school years.

“It does seem like things have morphed from, ‘Listen to any woman who says she’s been wronged,’ which is the right thing to do, to ‘automatically believe.’ That’s what’s scary,” added Maher.